I love FF I’ve been using it for well over a decade but it runs like absolute ass on my pc. I downloaded chrome to test the waters and it’s so much faster but now I feel like a shit for letting even more google into my life (already use youtube, gmail and search). Is there a hidden 3rd option I just don’t know about?
For some things, mostly JavaScript heavy sites, Chromium-based browsers are just better optimized. I definitely feel this on mobile - for web apps, Firefox is a little slower and uses a lot more battery. For everything else, though, Firefox performance is about the same, while using less memory. Before giving up on Firefox, you might want to try a userscript to tune performance. Betterfox is basically the standard here.
You also need an adblocker so that your computer doesn’t waste resources on rendering unnecessary things, but on a low-powered computer, there’s a trade-off to be made between effectiveness and performance. uBlock Origin is the gold standard adblocker, but on a literal potato you might actually want to try uBlock Origin Lite.
He could also consider giving NoScript a try (taking into account that many websites will completely break without temporarily being set to trusted).
I like the idea of noscript, but it was too impractical for me. I wonder if there are some lists of sites that run fine without javascript so that we can block js on them or something in these lines. It would also be nice if we had a list of unnecessary js scripts to block with ublock